China is now making every effort to gain silicon independence. According to the plan of the ruling party, by 2025 at least 70% of chips in Chinese products should be local production. A special role in achieving this goal is assigned to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), which is actively developing advanced technologies in the production of semiconductor products.
IBM and Samsung claim they’ve made a breakthrough in semiconductor design. On day one of the IEDM conference in San Francisco, the two companies unveiled a new design for stacking transistors vertically on a chip. With current processors and SoCs, transistors lie flat on the surface of the silicon, and then electric current flows from side-to-side. By contrast, Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) sit perpendicular to one another and current flows vertically.
According to IBM and Samsung, this design has two advantages. First, it will allow them to bypass many performance limitations to extend Moore’s Law beyond the 1-nanometer threshold. More importantly, the design leads to less wasted energy thanks to greater current flow. They estimate VTFET will lead to processors that are twice as fast and use 85 percent less power than chips designed with FinFET transistors. IBM and Samsung claim the process may one day allow for phones that go a full week on a single charge. They say it could also make certain energy-intensive tasks, including cryptomining, more power-efficient and therefore less impactful on the environment.
IBM and Samsung haven’t said when they plan to commercialize the design. They’re not the only companies attempting to push beyond the 1-nanometer barrier., Intel said it aims to finalize the design for angstrom-scale chips by 2024. The company plans to accomplish the feat using its new “Intel 20A” node and RibbonFET transistors.
Researchers in Finland have developed a circuit that produces the high-quality microwave signals required to control quantum computers while operating at temperatures near absolute zero. This is a key step towards moving the control system closer to the quantum processor, which may make it possible to greatly increase the number of qubits in the processor.
One of the factors limiting the size of quantum computers is the mechanism used to control the qubits in quantum processors. This is normally accomplished using a series of microwave pulses, and because quantum processors operate at temperatures near absolute zero, the control pulses are normally brought into the cooled environment via broadband cables from room temperature.
As the number of qubits grows, so does the number of cables needed. This limits the potential size of a quantum processor, because the refrigerators cooling the qubits would have to become larger to accommodate more and more cables while also working harder to cool them down—ultimately a losing proposition.
A new computational simulator can help predict whether changes to materials or design will improve performance in new photovoltaic cells.
In the ongoing race to develop ever-better materials and configurations for solar cells, there are many variables that can be adjusted to try to improve performance, including material type, thickness, and geometric arrangement. Developing new solar cells has generally been a tedious process of making small changes to one of these parameters at a time. While computational simulators have made it possible to evaluate such changes without having to actually build each new variation for testing, the process remains slow.
Now, researchers at MIT and Google Brain have developed a system that makes it possible not just to evaluate one proposed design at a time, but to provide information about which changes will provide the desired improvements. This could greatly increase the rate for the discovery of new, improved configurations.
While they wrestle with the immediate danger posed by hackers today, US government officials are preparing for another, longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future.
The threat comes from quantum computers, which work very differently from the classical computers we use today. Instead of the traditional bits made of 1s and 0s, they use quantum bits that can represent different values at the same time. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain practically impossible for modern machines—including breaking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, trade, and state secrets.
While quantum computers are still in their infancy, incredibly expensive and fraught with problems, officials say efforts to protect the country from this long-term danger need to begin right now.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT) demonstrated that an experimental method known as randomized compiling (RC) can dramatically reduce error rates in quantum algorithms and lead to more accurate and stable quantum computations. No longer just a theoretical concept for quantum computing, the multidisciplinary team’s breakthrough experimental results are published in Physical Review X.
The experiments at AQT were performed on a four-qubit superconducting quantum processor. The researchers demonstrated that RC can suppress one of the most severe types of errors in quantum computers: coherent errors.
Akel Hashim, AQT researcher, involved in the experimental breakthrough and a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley explained: “We can perform quantum computations in this era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing, but these are very noisy, prone to errors from many different sources, and don’t last very long due to the decoherence—that is, information loss—of our qubits.”
It is the highest resolution sensor of its type ever made.
Canon has developed an image sensor that is capable of capturing high-quality color photography even in the dark. The company says that it will be able to shoot clear photos even in situations where nothing is visible to the naked eye.
In a report from Nikkei, Canon says that it has developed a new type of light-receiving element called a single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) and is implementing it on a CMOS sensor. SPAD photodetector technology on its own isn’t new, and has been in use since the 1970s. However, Canon has managed to create a sensor with 3.2 million pixels, which it says is more than three times the resolution of conventional SPADs and makes it the highest-resolution sensor of its type ever made.
The sensor is designed to replace, or at least provide an alternative to, infrared night vision cameras. Infrared is useful for recognizing shapes and providing sight in the dark, but is not capable of recognizing colors. On the flipside, cameras that can see color in the dark only do so by leveraging high ISOs, which can work to a certain point but eventually lead to extremely noisy images in levels of extreme darkness.
A bigger deal than computational photography?
Samsung and Canon have both announced new camera sensors that are both innovative in very different ways. But how exciting are they?
